The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996

by Robert Pinsky

The Figured Wheel fully collects the first four books of poetry, as well as twenty-one new poems, by Robert Pinsky, the former U.S. Poet Laureate.

Critic Hugh Kenner, writing about Pinsky's first volume, described this poet's work as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience." Both the transformation of the familiar and the uttering of what has been hitherto mute or implicit in our culture continue to be central to Pinsky's art. New poems like "Avenue" and "The City Elegies" envision the urban landscape's mysterious epitome of human pain and imagination, forces that recur in "Ginza Samba," an astonishing history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell," a jazz-like work that intertwines elegy with both the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. A final section of translations includes Pinsky's renderings of poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan, and others, as well as the last canto of his award-winning version of the Inferno.

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century, Fiction, Literature, The United States Of America, American

320 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 1996

About the author

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.
wikipedia

Reviews

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is nothing wrong with Robert Pinsky’s poems. Which was the worst thing I could think to say about a “collected” book of poetry spanning three decades. Three decades of getting nothing wrong. Every thought and emotion, even the naughty ones, are as carefully vetted as political candidates for unseemly stains and wrong-thinking. These poems are career-builders, chock full o’ creative writing kind of writing and they have served him well, for Robert Pinsky is the closest thing America has to Mr. Poetry, especially now that Donald Hall has grown too old to engage in all the traveling and back-slapping the job requires. Pinsky was an especially energetic Librarian of Congress. Also, he translated Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” something that happens every three weeks in America and appears to be a minimum job requirement for an Establishment American Poet. According to Wikipedia, Pinsky even judged a poetry contest between Sean Penn and Steven Colbert on the Colbert Report. It doesn’t get any bigger than that. Except for that darned old Pulitzer. Pinsky hasn’t got one of those yet, dammit…

Years ago, I happened on Pinsky’s book of criticism, “The Situation of Poetry,” which came out in the mid-1970s. In it, Pinsky took on 20th century poetry and I learned a lot. Re-reading parts of it recently I noted how careful he is - it strikes me as being a book of criticism by a young poet trying to clear some space for himself while not offending anybody who might matter. Still, parts of it are rather bold for a guy who turned out to be American Poetry’s Mr. Smoothie. The problem is, where he is at his most critical (and interesting) in “The Situation of Poetry,” Pinsky is also unable, in his own poems, to take his own good advice. For instance, here is one of my favorite passages:

One of the most contemporary strains in contemporary poetry is often interior, submerged, free-playing, elusive, more fresh than earnest, more eager to surprise than to tell. The “surrealist” diction associated with such writing sometimes suggest, not a realm beyond surface reality, but a particular reality, hermetically primitive, based on a new poetic diction: “breath,” “snow,” “future,” “blood,” “silence,” “eats,” “water,” and most of all “light” doing the wildly unexpected. On the one hand, some poetic diction or other may be inescapable even for the greatest masters. But on the other hand, poets have been know, historically, to strangle their work on gobbets of poetic diction; when poetry gets too far from prose, it may be in danger of choking itself on a thick, rich handful of words.”

Robert Pinsky, “The Situation of Poetry” (“Poetic Diction, Prose Virtues”) (pp. 162-163)

Great stuff here. Although written in the mid-1970s, the word “’light’ doing the wildly unexpected” is still very much a pox on American poetry. But again and again in “The Figured Wheel” I find poem after poem of Pinsky’s “choking itself on a thick, rich, handful of words.”

Immortal Longings

Inside the silver body
Slowing as it banks through veils of cloud
We float separately in our seats

Like the cells or atoms of one
Creature, needs
And states of a shuddering god.

Under him, a thirsty brilliance.
Pulsing or steady,
The fixed lights of the city

And the flood of carlights coursing
Through the grid: Delivery,
Arrival, Departure. Whim. Entering

And entered. Touching
And touched: down
The lit boulevards, over the bridges

And the river like an arm of night.
Book, cigarette. Bathroom.
Thirst. Some of us are asleep.

We tilt roaring
Over the glittering
Zodiac of intentions.

In this short poem, light does about a half dozen things both expected (carlights coursing through the grid, those “lit boulevards”) and unexpected here (the lights of the city and their “thirsty brilliance” a “glittering / Zodiac”). But it is such a nice poem, a well-meaning and humane poem, a poem that is so stately in its solemn desire to comfort and console us poor forked mortal creatures that it is impossible to hate, exactly. I mean gosh, what is it I want exactly if I can’t like a “good” poem like this one? It’s not stupid; Pinsky knows what he is doing in a competent workmanlike way. The line and stanza breaks don’t appear to be entirely random. As I said before, there is nothing wrong, exactly, with Robert Pinsky’s poems. But as much as I despair when I read the gazillion poems just like “Immortal Longings” (Joseph S. Salemi calls this stuff the poetry of the “Portentous Hush”), it would be unfair to underestimate its appeal to a lot of people. What kind of people? Well, lets take the case of “Immortal Longings.” It first appeared in print in 1989 in “The Paris Review,” perhaps the most prestigious purely “literary” journals in America. In 2004 “The Paris Review” republished the poem in an anthology called “The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms,” which I’d guess is one of those attempts to publish a poetry anthology meant to appeal to a mythical general poetry readership consisting of regular folks like John Candy and Steve Martin, you know. But before that, Garrison Keillor featured it on the March 3, 1996 episode of his beloved NPR program “Writer’s Almanac.” Keillor has featured a Robert Pinsky poem 12 times since 1996 (with four of these appearances being for “First Early Mornings Together”), a sure sign of having made it as an American poet. But, as I have said elsewhere a bunch of times, why is it that there has not been, for decades, a famous American poem (poem, not poet) - not since “Daddy” or Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” has there been a poem hit over the fence. Famous, but not really…

But books of poems, and the poets who write them are made “famous” all the time. At least they are plastered over with the extravagant praise that would indicate fame in less culturally inflationary times. ''The Figured Wheel” got this treatment in a “New York Times” review by Katha Pollitt

ROBERT PINSKY'S extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful volume of collected poems, ''The Figured Wheel,'' will remind readers that here is a poet who, without forming a mini-movement or setting himself loudly at odds with the dominant tendencies of American poetry, has brought into it something new -- beginning with his first volume, ''Sadness and Happiness'' (1975), and gathering authority with each subsequent book. Call it a way of being autobiographical without being confessional, of connecting the particulars of the self -- his Jewishness; his 1940's and 50's childhood in Long Branch, N.J.; his adult life as ''professor or / Poet or parent or writing conference pooh-bah'' -- with the largest intellectual concerns of history, culture, psychology and art.

***

Most of the time, though, the poems of his maturity manage their startling shifts and juxtapositions in ways that give intellectual and sensuous delight.

New York Times, August 18, 1996 (http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/20...)

In a similar vein, in an earlier review of Pinsky’s book “The Want Bone,” Edward Hirsch says this:

Filling the emptiness with images from the heart ("the legendary muscle that wants and grieves") is a way of not letting the void swallow us. "The Want Bone" is especially keyed to our "immortal" longings, both to what separates and what connects us, to "the circle of desire, that aches to play / Or sings to hear the song passing."

"The Want Bone" is about the conflicting and overlapping metaphysics of Judaism and Christianity, about history as an invisible presence, about the creative and destructive potential of the imagination, about the drives and powers that shape us and that we in turn transfigure into the emblems and artifacts of culture, into, say, weapons and songs, the strife and music of desire itself. It is Robert Pinsky's riskiest and most imaginative book of poems.

New York Times, Nov. 18, 1990 (http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/18/boo...)

All the blather and blah-blah of one Establishment Poet talking about another, somewhat more “famous” Establishment Poet. Extraordinarily nothing! Startling nothing! Sensuous nothing! Riskiest nothing! That Pollitt can state that Pinsky is in any way “loudly at odds with the dominant tendencies of American poetry” is so outrageous as to defy parody, for Pinsky is very much an embodiment of these “dominant tendencies.” But the worst thing of all, as with all such Poetry Establishment reviews, they provides no literary context; the incontinent gush inundates everything. Such gross over-praise leaves no room for doubt. All American poets, if they persist and make the right friends, will eventually get this kind of an A+++ for their “collected” poems awarded by another Establishment Poet waiting for her own A+++. And for culturally nostalgic reasons, “The New York Times” will continue to publish these so-called reviews, at least until newspapers cease to exist.

But is it even true that Pinsky’s poetry is loved by the kind of people who find Garrison Kellior and “New York Times” reviewer-poets such as Ed Hirsch and Katha Pollitt to be reliable tastemakers for contemporary poetry? The kind of readers who might think Plath was a little out of line calling daddy a bastard and who find John Berryman mostly just incoherent and incontinent (Berryman was incoherent and incontinent, but…)? But seriously, what audience is there, really, for this book? Do such readers actually like the idea of a Robert Pinsky poem more than they like an actual Robert Pinsky poem? Pinsky’s Wikipedia article may provide some insight. As Wikipedia articles go, it is pretty pathetic (and I am a Wikipedia fan); it is one of those rote pieces about somebody or something “famous” that nobody really gives a shit about. I say this because nobody ever bothers to edit or flag the article because nobody cares enough to do so. The quote below (with misspellings) is both sad and somewhat peculiar:

Rather than intending to communicate a single or concrete meaning with his work, Pinsky anticipated that his poetry will (sic?) change depending on the particular subjectivity of each reader. Embracing the idea that people's individuality will fill out the poem, he has said, "The poetry I love is written with someone’s voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone’s voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified; it’s the actual living breath inside a body—not necessarily the second life of reception—not necessarily the expert’s body or the artist’s body. Whoever reads the poem aloud becomes the proper medium for the poem." Pinksky (sic) observes 'the kind of poetry I write emphasizes the physical qualities of the words' for poetry to Pinsky, is a vocal art, not neccessarily (sic) performative, but reading to one self or recalling some lines by memory

Wikipedia; sources noted as
Sleigh, Tom. "Robert Pinsky", ‘’BOMB Magazine’’ Summer, 1998. Retrieved on June 19, 2012. Interview with Grace Cavalieri, The Poet and the Poem, on WPFW-FM 1996-96 season
The Art of Poetry interview 1996 with Downing & Kunitz

This is all very suspect, coming (presumably; I am assuming the sources are correct) from Robert Pinsky. Is this his attempt to gain postmodern credibility in a creaky deconstructionist way - you know, the author isn’t really the author of his own stuff via the theory-mongering of Derrida and Foucault? But Pinsky is not that kind of “theoretical” poet at all. Not even close. His poems are “crafted” to death, all the blood, piss, and stink replaced by contemporary mainstream poetry’s embalming fluids and perfumes. There is no room for “whoever reads the poem” to do anything else but slog through the well-wrought wroughtfulness of them. Or let Garrison Kellior slog through them for you in his gravelly, folksy way on “Writer’s Almanac.”

***

Well, these genuine Robert Pinsky fans, whoever they might be, have definitely got some stamina. Pinsky fears not, in an age of diminished attention spans and a culture that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about poetry, to write very long poems. “An Explanation of America” noted as being “a poem to my daughter” runs from pages 157 to 199. Here is a sample from this profound rumination:

And motion would be a place, and who knows, you
May live there in the famous national “love
Of speed” as though in some small town where children
Walk past their surnames in the churchyard, you
At home among the murmur of that place
Unthinkable for me, but for the children
Of that place comforting as an iceman’s horse.”
(p. 167)

I picked that one at random but it seems like a pretty good sample of Pinsky’s approach; unimpeachably gorgeous writing of the professional versifier’s sort, with lines no prose writer would deign use (“the murmur of that place”) and a sticky nostalgia that predates even Pinsky’s direct experience (the iceman and his comforting horse, c. 1912). This book is filled with page after page of this stuff:

Nothing can seem more final than the mountains,
Where Empires seem to grow and fade like moss --
But even mountains have come to need protection,
By special laws and organized committees,
From our ingenuities, optimism, needs.
The passion to make new beginnings can shatter
The highest solitude, or living rock…

This is automatic writing of the Laureate sort. Note the slipshod simile “fade like moss” which isn’t really true, is it? (Have you ever seen faded moss? Really?). Note the slipshod prose: so glad to hear those are “special” laws rather than non-special ones, so glad to hear they’re “organized” committees rather than disorganized ones. The gist of it, of course, is po-faced environmental concern of the usual accepted sort. I’m not disagreeing with the sentiment so much as I object to have it presented as a “poem.” This is the kind of stuff you write if you want to be Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

***

Oscar Wilde once said “Only mediocrities develop.” Indeed, many awful Establishment Poets have relentlessly developed over the course of their careers. For instance, W. S. Merwin’s career consists of a frantic attempt of a poetaster to find a “voice” by trying virtually every literary fashion that he encountered. Pinsky, on the other hand, from the very beginning of his career decided on the gorgeously numinous approach to versifying; among prose writers this is known as going purple. The quotes above are from the more recent (1990s) work. “The Figured Wheel” goes all the way back to 1966 (although his first book, “Sadness and Happiness” is from 1975). Here is part of the first poem from that section, “Poem About People”:

The jaunty crop-haired graying
Women in grocery sores,
Their clothes boyish and neat,
New mittens or clean sneaker,

Clean hands, hips not bad still,
Buying ice cream, steaks, soda,
Fresh melons and soap -- or the big
Balding young men in work shoes

And green work pants, beer belly
And white T-shit, the porky walk
Back to the truck, polite; possible
To feel briefly like Jesus,

A gust of diffuse tenderness
Crossing the dark spaces
To where the dry self burrows
Or nest, something that tires,

Watching the kinds of people
On the street for a while --
But how love falters and flags
When anyone’s difficult eyes come

Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique
Soul, its need unlovable: my friend
In his divorced schoolteacher
Apartment, his own unsuspected

Paintings hung everywhere,
Which his wife kept in a closet --
Not, he says, that she wasn’t
Perfectly right…

This maunders on for several more stanzas then ends like this:

The sopping open spaces
Of roads, golf courses, parking lots,
Flails a commotion
In the dripping treetops,

Tries a half-rotten shingle
Or a down-hung branch, and we
All dream it, the dark wind crossing
The wide spaces between us.
(pp. 207-208)

1966 or 1996? Katha Pollitt gushes about Pinsky’s “poems of his maturity,” but I can’t tell the difference. Pinsky seems to have figured out what kind of poet he wanted to be right from the get-go, and the book presents a solid phalanx of the same old thing. If I liked the old thing to begin with, I wouldn’t mind. As seen here, these poems, old and new, are chock full of careful but often pointless descriptions (the old ladies have “clean” hands and they buy “fresh” melons) and squishy epiphanies (those “dark spaces” and then those “wide spaces between us”). There’s a long, careful tradition of quality control down at Pinsky’s Yawn Factory. You’re guaranteed, as when you stay in a well-run motel chain, to get no surprises.

***

There are some things to say in Pinsky’s favor. Unlike many of his contemporaries he does not overproduce. From 1975 to 1990 he published only four books of poetry, which demonstrates his remarkable constraint. His poems, as carefully boring as they are, are not nearly as bad as, say, Frank Bidart’s vatic high-flown metaphysical nonsense, Jane Hirschfield’s diary rejects pinched, apparently, from Stevie Nicks, or the decades-long frantic search of a poet for his voice that the culture’s endured with W. S. Merwin. Still, I found this book tough going (no, I did not read all of it, not even close). Robert Haas, who is far more annoying to me, is paradoxically more enjoyable to read since Haas, as unctuous and sloppy as he is, generally at least tries to do things out of the ordinary (you know, metaphors and stuff). Another thing about Pinsky in his favor is that I don’t know how he votes; he expresses the usual self-satisfied liberalism of virtually all American Establishment Poets (see the endangered mountains protected by special laws and organized committees noted above), but at least we don’t get any overt foreign policy expositions.

I started out this review by saying nothing goes wrong in Pinsky’s poems, but perhaps it is best to add that he paradoxically never gets anything right either. Here, in the first half of Pinsky’s career, is the careful (but not careful enough), stately, well meaning purplish murmurs that characterize the career of so many Establishment Poets. Poems guaranteed to garner head nods of appreciation at poetry readings. The kind of poems that make up the sixteen-mile-thick bedrock of American Establishment Poetry of the past thirty or forty years. Here, Robert Pinsky gives us the first half of his career. We can look forward to another couple decades of similarly stately, boring stuff, no doubt. Warnings and tributes about America in sixteen pages addressed to his granddaughters in which biplanes and Model-T’s rattled down dusty roads. Light will do things both ordinary and wildly unexpected. Clean old ladies will stay clean. Organized organizations will stay organized. The dark and wide spaces between us will all be acknowledged at length, gravid with lots of automatic empathetic-sounding blather. Other poets such as Katha Pollitt and Ed Hirsch will cut ‘n’ paste stuff like “extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful volume of collected poems.” Pinsky will, eventually, win that Pulitzer Prize, I’m certain.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Consummate. The book spans some thirty years & in that span, there is much to be appreciated about the variety he chose to include in his maturation of works. What appealed to me about this collection of works was the historical aspect of incorporating literary works from many great minds. He meshes & blends these motifs well with modern day occurrences. His natural psychoanalytical perspective breathes vivid life into his anecdotal visitations to his past. The people, places, emotions, descriptions really come to life. He possesses the uncanny ability to sum up the profound while integrating a wide array of subject matter. The personal dedications, which he sprinkles throughout, are wonderfully endearing & sincere in their sentimentality, that you, the reader, feel a real friendship flourishing just by merely allowing his voice into your heart & mind. It sounds cliché, but he is truly a national treasure. His work is authentically American & beyond that, authentically human. His religious pieces are quite original as far as I've read from many other poets incorporating spirituality, religious doctrine, folklore & the ritualistic. He seems to follows suit with the likes of T.S. Eliot & Ezra Pound with regards to drawing from a varying pool of literary voices yet does not overtly abscond with the very words of those minds. He proposes a very original view & take upon that which has demanded great scrutiny from scholars of literature. In this persona, he reads like a professor prophesying his masterly work to his pupils but not in a pontificating manner, rather in a homely comforting manner, as if inviting you into his home to become enchanted with the professor’s wife, children & family album. I loved this book & highly recommend him as a mind that must not be ignored.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are going to get started with Pinsky, this is the book to do it with. It has his master-poems, "The Figured Wheel," "Shirt," "At Pleasure Bay," and so on, and you can see his development from the earlier books. Pinsky is one SMART poet, and, though often ringing changes upon the form of the ode, he's endlessly inventive. Another one for every poet's bookshelf.

[T.L. Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought Robert Pinsky's book, The Figured Wheel, several years ago at a reading he did in Sun Valley, Idaho. It languished in my to-be-read pile for far too long. I'm not sure why, but I hesitated to start reading it. Until recently. The books covers poems he wrote ranging from 1966-1996. Once I started reading, I found myself alternating between loving the poems and trying to find meaning in them. Some were clear. Others felt rather obscure. I kept reading. Many of the poems felt universal and some felt deeply personal. Pinsky narrates life experience and muses on belief systems with equal weight. He explores mythology and juxtaposes it with everyday life in a thought provoking manner. He's not afraid to use as many or as few words as he needs to drive his point home. The Figured Wheel engrossed me in thought.

[DilanAc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came back to this book after reading Gulf Music. My appreciation for Pinsky continues to grow. He is a master of language and image. Truly one of our great living poets. He is the exact opposite of "sensational," yet he does not shy away from dark material.

[Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you read no other poet, please read Pinsky. And do yourself a favor and read it aloud, simply to yourself. Gorgeous, intelligent, aware.

[Logan Rand]

I don’t know how to feel about this book. I read it very slowly over more than a years time. At times I liked it but also many of the poems seemed pointless or made references to Greek mythology or biblical stuff I didn’t understand or care about. This book kinda turned me off to poetry a little bit. The super long poems are probably not for me

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esoteric, spiritual, Jewish/ancient historic themes. There's distance in these poems that I wanted to relate to. Academic, lofty, pious. The voices of these poems, the personas, feel entirely removed from contemporary times. From THE WANT BONE collection, I especially loved "Shirt" and "Dream."

[Mcatania21 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose Pinsky’s “The Volume” (109-110) to demonstrate his craftsmanship as a poet. What I found the most pleasure in is how he contrasts the haunting ocean with the merriment on shore. As Prof. Montesonti points out, Pinky “seeks the truth” and “explores subject matter” with such “breath, width, and depth.” In “The Volume,” he sees beyond a typical beach scene; he questions the “huge ritual fires” and “people eating and dancing.” The innocent and perhaps ignorant beach bunnies are juxtaposed with the “crippled sloop” and “ghostlike surf.” It’s as if the ocean holds all of the world’s secrets; Pinsky shows the water as powerful and mysterious with this metaphor: “oblivious black volume.” Pinsky equates the ocean to death, and here are carefree beach-goers playing and laughing right next to their death.



He observes: “they never try to think about the whole range and weight of ocean.” I wish he would have explained that range and weight in more detail. As we delve deeper into the poem and the oceanic subject matter, Pinsky starts imagining what it would be like to “drown in that calamitous belly.” For him, it “would be dying twice.” I found this line disturbing and intriguing since I write a lot about death and drowning in my poetry and tried to figure out what he meant by that. Is he saying that drowning is such a horrendous way to go, that it is like suffering two deaths?



I also wonder why Pinsky’s relationship with the ocean is so mystical and skeptical. Why does he fear the “kelp-colored, chill sucking” water? He does not tell a personal story of a family member drowning; instead it’s a side story of his daughter Caroline who injures her leg and states “she didn’t want to die.” This side story seemed out of place in the context of the oceanic theme, however, I get that Pinsky was trying to convey a larger message about human survival and the inevitability of human mortality, which is a signature move of Pinsky to be write ambitiously about universal themes.



Pinsky litters his poem with dark metaphors that depict nature as dangerous and unwelcoming, such as: “stars painted as large as moths” and “dream like the corpse’s long hair.” I wanted to know more about the “monsters striding by;” who are they and why are they monsters?



What I found most pleasurable about this poem is that Pinsky ends his work of art by critiquing another work of art. He analyzes a famous painting by John Singleton Copley, “ Brook Watson and the Shark” (you can view the painting here: http://www.paintinghere.org/painting/...) The painting is about a shark attack on a young boy who lost his leg in the 1700s. He notes the “white faces of the living” which is perhaps a larger comment on human panic, because of our own mortality. I thought it was peculiar that he called the victim’s hair “calm”? He also notes the “gray-green paint” of the water as “mysterious.”

[Donald Armfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

After Reading Gulf Music I thought I would try some of Pinsky's earlier work. This is a collection of some of his previous work.

New Poems
City of Dark (this gave me an idea for my own story, I am currently writing)
Soot
Desecration of the Gravestone of Rose P.

The Want Bone (1990)
Memoir
Window
The Hearts
The Uncreation
Picture

Overall those were my favorites, small list for a 300+ page book. But nothing was really pulling me in. Maybe one day I will read his translation of The Inferno of Dante.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...you passed,
Leaves coppery and quick as lizards moved
Around your delicate ankles; November sun
Lay on the sidewalk, ordinary and final
As the sentences too flat for any poem."

(from "The Sentences")


"One way I need you, the way I come to need
Our custom of speech, or need this other custom
Of speech in lines, is to alleviate
The weather, the time of year, the time of day"

(from "The Time of Year, The Time of Day")

[Allen Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Pinsky's poetry is rich. Excellent reading material. I highly recommend The Figured Wheel for everyone who loves great literary poetry.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impossible to tell in writing...

[SmarterLilac · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like Robert Pinsky's writing, and this stellar collection gives a nice overview of his impressive career.

[Emily]

Intense brain imagery.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

He is not to my taste, but was on the list for the Well-Educated Mind.